Sheila walked grumbily toward the mule cart. Considering what she’d just seen with the cow, she had a feeling that the egg shed was worth a look but she couldn’t bring herself to go and see what kind of mess that monster had devolved into. If Steve could get rid of half of the previous existing mass that had called that shed home they’d still have too many eggs every day.
She knew what he would do. First he’d sell to Muleman, whose double face had made Sheila vomit in her own mouth a little when she’d seen it, growl escaping in response the way it did when she didn’t understand and wanted to keep acting tough until she figured it out. That was fine. She understood and appreciated commerce. But then he’d try and work out some kind of deal with the militia captain and that wasn’t going to work for her. So she needed to consider how best to subvert that plan. Ideally it would be by killing everyone standing at the foot of her hill.
Knife lessons aside, she’d found herself fairly adept at that kind of thing. The mechanics of it were difficult- learning to shoot a gun, learning to wield a cleaver, learning various schools of butchering- but the mental processes located just to the right of those requirements didn’t take the kinds of adjustment Sheila would have expected had she thought about this before the killing had become required of her. And so she moved toward Muleman’s cart full of plans and schemes that started with “Those people dead.” and worked backwards from there. Truth be told she didn’t expect too much from the cart itself, but it was an opportunity to get a jump on her enemies, and she didn’t need Rob McKenna to explain to her how that was objectively a good thing.
He popped up from behind the mule cart anyway.
Her heart a mess and her hand on her knife, Sheila breathed deeply and reminded herself- now that she could see who it was that had scared the shit out of her- that this person had thrown her to the ground while also holding a basket so full of eggs it might have started a colony worth diplomatic ties to and relaxed.
“What the fuck, Rob?”
“Hmm?”
“Where… I… . Why the hell did you do that?”
“Which ‘that’?” He asked, plucking at the tarp that covered Muleman’s wares. His eyebrows stayed exactly as they were.
“Any of them. Disappearing. Popping up from out of nowhere. Being born. Pick one and explain while catch my fucking breath.” He looked up, disdain failing to mar his expression, then he put the tarp back down and cleared his throat.
“I told you to leave because you’re going to die.”
“I feel like that one was already explained.”
“We made no allowance for previous explanation. And anyway you have a second chance now. Or maybe a third. If these were strikes you’d be a different kind of cigarette.” She glared at him.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she said. He nodded.
“Then that’s the game.” He flipped over the tarp and Sheila’s knees went weak.
We wonder if there has ever been anything nice under a tarp. Tarps cover many things: cars that are worth too much to show freely; bodies during mass casualty events; holes in the roof. But we’re not sure there’s even been, say, a pony that didn’t require feeding or some kind of ancient, legally exported Chinese artifact hidden under a tarp. Certainly not when combined with the rickety conveyance that is a mule cart and the simple weakening of Sheila’s knees.
But consider for a second whether it’s possible that this time, and only this time, both the tarp and Sheila’s knees are irrelevant to the revelation. What think you is under the tarp of the two-faced man that can make mutant cows split apart like a melting popsicle? What possible object of beauty or whimsy could he- might he- be hiding under a weatherproof piece of plastic fabric that he felt it would be beneficial to carry into a fracas which drew him in with the sound of bombs ripping up a massive patch of forest- and if it didn’t necessarily draw him, what sort of artistic treasure might this man have carried that would make him say- if you’ll pardon us- ‘Fuck it, I’m going anyway. At least I have this.’? Perhaps a Bierstadt? Or some selvedge denim?
The rocket launcher looked new. Sheila would have sworn, given a bible or a notary, that she could see it gleam, even though the sun was behind the clouds and rocket launchers don’t really gleam. The kinds of things they were built to attack are the kinds of things that destroy gleams. But Sheila would have knifed a known orphan in the ribs for contradicting her, and as she ran her hands over the beautiful surface she felt her heart flutter in ways that would embarrass a tween. She, however, was neither a tween nor embarrassed and she leaned in and kissed the barrel with her full mouth.
“You understand that whatever they have is bigger than this, right?” Rob asked. Sheila flipped him the bird. They’d run when they saw this, she was sure of it. Besides, without their leader they were nothing, and that asshat wasn’t going back down the hill if she had to let Muleman eat her face or whatever he had planned to do if they hadn’t had a cow. “They blew up a hillside.”
“They had the whole night.”
“Don’t matter.”
“Neither do they anymore.” He sighed. He was doing a lot of that, Sheila noted. Then she forgot about it because there was a rocket launcher in front of her and a mass of people who needed moving from her doorstep. She picked it up, felt the heft and the glorious danger in it. The Muleman had said she could have whatever was in here. Pick of the cart, he’d said, and this was the only thing in the cart. So that was that. Slinging the webbed strap over her shoulder, she pulled the tarp back across the now empty space and turned back to Rob. “I’m going inside.”
“Fair enough,” he said. His eyes had a sad sort of twinkle, and she thought for a moment that it was a little weird, seeing this man get emotional. Then she decided she’d imagined it, because after she turned away and couldn’t see it anymore it seemed ridiculous. She had a rocket launcher now, to go with all the other goodies she’d stored. The people down there encroaching were absolutely done for, they just didn’t know it yet.
The door to the house swung open, a friend reminding her how much she had to fight for. Invaders, she thought. That’s what they are. Or will be. They did bomb me. Us. She thought of Steve, the dog. Rob too, in a sense. He’d been inside when it happened. They’d been bombed, and sitting back behind the barricades wasn’t going to cut it now that the barricades were gone. She pushed open the door to her bedroom, went straight to the closet, and lifted the green steamer lid.
We think it’s worth taking a moment to consider the concept of defense. It’s normal to draw a circle around what one considers ‘theirs’ and to stake a sort of proprietary claim. There are mechanisms that protect said, and to be completely realistic about the world and its workings- even as we know them, which is a far cry from the world which Sheila and Steve and (most especially) Rob inhabit- there are going to be times when the mechanisms don’t work and having one’s own method for dealing with those situations behooves the individual.
What we’re not sure about, what we don’t think is a good idea, is to dig so deeply that one finds false confidence and loses sight of concepts like absolute value. A thousand to one is a thousand to one, and even if you’re somehow worth three hundred of that thousand you still have seven hundred to deal with after that, and now they’re mad that you killed their friends. The odds that face Sheila may not be quite that high, but neither- we suggest- is her value, or anyone’s value, and once one is dead the things one has been fighting for are neither owned nor reclaimable. So while it may be normal to leap to defense, normality also extends to retreat, to pauses for thought, to living to fight another day. Living is, after all, the most normal thing in life.
Fortunately for Sheila life- perhaps on account of the travails she’d gone through, perhaps on account of Rob’s disnormal secondary attempts at persuasion, or perhaps simply because it liked her for some reason (a facet of life’s whimsy we think is too often ignored) – seemed to have felt particularly beneficent, because just as she picked up a Desert Eagle she’d taken from the case of a miraculously stocked gun store in Hathaway, the militia captain kicked open the half-closed bedroom door.
